Michel Platini will be confirmed as the Uefa president for another four-year term tomorrow if, as expected, no one submits a challenge to his tenure by tonight's midnight deadline.

The French former world and European footballer of the year has held European football's top administrative post since January 2007 and announced in March he would seek another four years in office.

Having stood three years ago on an inclusion ticket, Platini has delivered on his promise to "take the game back to the fans in the smaller countries". That pledge remains a vote-winner among the rump of the 53 member associations. Compared with the 2007‑08 season, his first full campaign as president, teams from Israel, Denmark, Switzerland, Slovakia and Serbia have taken part in the Champions League group stage. This came at the expense of the Portuguese, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Scottish and Czech leagues. Russia and France have also had their participation increased by a single club.

Platini has been able to deliver a timely sweetener for Uefa associations ahead of tonight's deadline. Last Friday, after the executive committee meeting in Prague, Uefa announced a €300,000-a-year boost to all member associations' conditional funding, largesse that would probably not be overlooked if Platini's candidacy was contested. But despite Platini's enthusiasm for another term, his next four years may prove stormy. The big clubs are less pleased about the Champions League reforms than the "smaller countries".

Football's way forward

Beyond considering whom to appoint as its chairman, the Football Association board will hear today the outcomes of the review of international player development. Commissioned after England's woebegone World Cup display, the review will make a number of proposals aimed at forming a production line of talent from the earliest stages of youth football to full international honours.

It is the latest of a number of such reviews, including the Lewis review (published 2007, discarded January 2009) and has been led by the FA's general secretary, Alex Horne, and the Club England managing director, Adrian Bevington. This time, with Horne demanding from his staff a more collegiate approach towards the people who will be called upon to deliver the proposals, there are strong hopes that today's discussions will lead to a positive outcome.

But do not expect the adoption of the most radical of proposals – raised by Sam Allardyce this month and reinforced by Arsène Wenger – that football should, at youth level at the very least, be played only in the summer. Cricket can breathe a sigh of relief.

Briatore poser

With QPR three points clear in the Championship with a game in hand the Premier League could face a tough examination of its regulations in the close season. This column revealed yesterday that the Football League had failed to enact its own rules regarding owners and directors who are serving suspensions imposed by other sports' governing bodies. For now, Flavio Briatore remains a director at Loftus Road and the League will not oblige him to step down despite his sale of his shares in QPR to Bernie Ecclestone last week. But if QPR are promoted and Briatore remains on the board the Premier League, which aligned its rules with those for Football League clubs in the summer, may take a different view.

Grassroots miss out

Amateur football clubs who believed they might benefit from a windfall from the redistribution to grassroots of a minimum of 30% of the Premier League's near-£700m-a-year domestic broadcast incomes, always had another think coming.

And so it proved yesterday when the government-supported Sports and Recreation Alliance report into broadcasting said the Premier League distributions already exceed 30% of their net domestic broadcast income. "Net" is the key word here. Included in the calculations of their distributions to, ahem, "grassroots" are: "Solidarity payments to the Football League in terms of parachute payments." According to the report "sports should have some discretion to determine what qualifies as grassroots development within the context of their particular organisation or sport." Which is fair enough. But if those were the terms of reference, no one should have been talking about grassroots in the first place.